HTC brings completely new UI with crazy animations to new “Infobar” phone [VIDEO]

HTC has teamed up with Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa to release the next iteration of the stylish Japanese “Infobar” phone series. The phone runs a completely new UI known as “iida UI 2.0” (iida stands for “innovation,” “imagination,” “design” and “art”) and it certainly lives up to its name. The iida UI comes with all sorts of fancy animations, eye candy, and intuitive touch based navigation. The beautiful new skin is running atop of Android 4.1 but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the software. In fact, it looks like it could be more related to Windows Phone with a home screen that mimics Windows’ “live tiles” layout.

The phone itself sports some pretty great specs including a 1.5GHz quad-core chip from Qualcomm, 1GB of RAM, a 4.7-inch 720p display, 16GB of storage, a microSD slot, and a capacious 2,100mAh battery. As for radios, the phone will primarily rely on an LTE radio (800/1500), but also has capabilities to access CDMA2000 800/2100 and WCDMA 850/1900/2100 networks, meaning it would be a great global phone. Besides all that you get an 8 megapixel camera with HTC’s Imagesense technology, a 2.1 front facing camera, Beats Audio, and NFC! It’s all packed inside the 9.7mm-thick, 147g-heavy waterproof (IPX5 and IPX7) and dustproof (IP5X) body. Pretty cool! The phone is set to be released in Japan around mid-February. Check out some videos of the device’s new UI and some more photos after the break! Do you guys prefer this to HTC’s Sense UI?

Alex Enfiedjian is an Android enthusiast and tech journalist from Central California.

jack

Innovative? it’s windows phone 8, but android.

RTWright

Yeah and look how well it’s doing for Microsoft now? Hmmm…. But it will sell because it’s Android and HTC sure is scraping the bottom for designs. I mean, don’t get me wrong the person that did the design did a good job, but they could have been a lot more unique than copying Windows Phone 8.